Abstract
[In Edinburgh, 16 August 1773] He seemed to me to have an unaccountable prejudice against Swift; for I once took the liberty to ask him if Swift had personally offended him, and he told me, he had not. He said today, ‘Swift is clear, but he is shallow.1 In coarse humour, he is inferior to Arbuthnot;2 in delicate humour, he is inferior to Addison. So he is inferior to his contemporaries; without putting him against the whole world. I doubt if the “Tale of a Tub” was his: it has so much more thinking, more knowledge, more power, more colour, than any of the works which are indisputably his. If it was his, I shall only say, he was impar sibi.’3
‘Journal of a tour to the Hebrides’, in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, revised by L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934) V, 44–5, 58–61, 72–3, 208–9, 214–17, 230–1, 306–7.
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© 1987 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Boswell, J. (1987). Scotland (1773). In: Page, N. (eds) Dr Johnson. Interviews and Recollections. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08286-5_33
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08286-5_33
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